Aristotle In A Bottle -- Cheap

Socrates would have killed himself gladly with a cup of hemlock rather than read one line of sentimental sludge in Ethel Diamond's "philosophical" self-help book Aristotle Would Have Liked Oprah.

Diamond thinks the road to happiness and inner peace can be found by dumbing down the teachings of great philosophers. So with relentless joy, she grinds up the works of Kant, Spinoza and Nietzsche into mind-numbing pablum praising the power of positive thinking.

Her upbeat prose bursts with hackneyed phrases and moronic simplifications designed to help us understand these complex thinkers. Immanuel Kant published "terrific stuff" and was "a huge name in the history of philosophy," she tells us, breathless with excitement over these revelations.

Here's Diamond with her cliche-cluttered prose purring along ecstatically as she describes Socrates' state of mind after he was sentenced to death: "Socrates took a reality check on his situation and decided that, all things considered, it would be classier to go out with a bang."

Quick, where's the hemlock?

As the blurb on the book's back cover proclaims, "This is not your father's philosophy book." And thank God for that.